Commonly timing of sprint athletes by coaches is undertaken by the use of digital or non-digital stopwatches with the assistance of helpers timing at the finish line and advising runners of their times. Timing of competitors in school sports and amateur athletic competitions is also undertaken by the use of digital or non-digital stopwatches. Times given to athletes can be quickly forgotten and due to human reactions, the recorded times are usually not accurate and only provide an approximate time In club athletic competitions, there is usually required to be a timekeeper and a place judge for each athlete in a race. For example, if there are eight athletes, there should be eight timekeepers and eight place judges. Timekeepers are usually required to be positioned at different elevations in alignment with the finishing line so that each athlete can be viewed as they finish a race. A timekeeper stand may be located at the finishing line upon which timekeepers can be seated one above the other. Place judges are also provided at the finishing line to judge the order in which athletes cross the line which is then compared with the times recorded by the timekeepers to provide a result. Whilst the use of multiple timekeepers and place judges usually provides a reasonably accurate result, error can still occurs due to slow human reaction time in actuating the stopwatch and peripheral vision problems of fixing on a competitor at speed to judge the movement of the chest of the competitor in crossing the finish line. Errors can also occur where a number of athletes are crossing the line within a short period as the position of one athlete can block the view by a timekeeper of an athlete in an adjacent lane.
Often however the large number of people required to act as timekeepers and place judges are not available and thus the above tasks are often undertaken by a single timekeeper using a single stopwatch to time each competitor as he or she crosses a finish line. Due to the problems referred to above, the results when a single person is timekeeping are usually very inaccurate. Even when there is more than one timekeeper available, timekeeping is often inaccurate. For training purposes, timekeepers are not available and normally a coach is required to carry out timing functions which he or she does it either by himself or herself or with a helper.
Whilst some sophisticated stopwatches are available including stopwatches which have printers to print out results, they are still manually operated and thus suffer from errors caused by human reaction time as referred to above. Other systems have individual timekeeper push button units connected to a central processing unit however these systems also rely on human reaction time for accuracy.
For more sophisticated events, timing of athletes is done electronically with a scanning camera which is set up to monitor the finish line of a track up to the finishing line and a computer programmed with suitably software is used to record the times of athletes and also place athletes at the finish line. Whilst this form of equipment is suitable for the larger athletic meets, the cost involved makes them unsuitable for most training and other athletic meets such as athletic meets involving children at schools and further involves multiple operators to operate the system and manually determine the athlete's torso crossing the finish line from pictures. In more sophisticated systems particularly used for training elite athletes and racing, a set of posts are used to delineate each lane at the finish line and a transmitter and receivers on the posts are used to identify and time runners.
Another field in which timing of athletes is undertaken is in swimming races where timing and finishing order of swimmers in swimming races is typically achieved by the use of touch pads at one or both ends of a swimming pool which are actuated when touched by swimmers finishing a race or turning at an end of the pool. It is relatively common however for swimmers to damage their hands or fingers when touching pads of this type as it is normally necessary to touch the pads with a sufficient force to cause actuation of switches in the pads.
Timing of swimmers whilst undergoing training is usually undertaken by coaches who use manually operable stop watches to time the laps which swimmers swim. It is very difficult however for coaches to determine incremental speed of swimmers when swimming a lap. For example, it would be desirable if a coach could time different increments during a training swim say every ten meters of a lap to improve swimming efficiency and coaching. It would be further desirable if a coach could view or ascertain the trajectory of a swimmer for example when diving from starting blocks into a pool or undertaking a turn at the end of a pool. Although cameras can be used for this purpose, cameras are particularly expensive and usually only available in the larger competition pools.
Timing and finishing order of other objects such as moving vehicles or animals such as horses in a race is also undertaken and although timing is not as crucial as with athletes, it would be desirable to have an effective means for accurately timing such events as well as ensure correct placings.
The present invention aims to address one or more of the above disadvantages of the prior art or at least provide an effective or useful alternative to the prior art.